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Doctor: A terminally ill patient

If you have a doctor friend, you must be receiving WhatsApp forwarded jokes about patient visiting the doctor after googling the symptoms.

While doctors are trying to make fun of this increasingly common phenomenon by imagining that their knowledge is far too superior for patients to use google meaningfully, their response reminds me of a medical theory.

It is proposed that a terminally ill patient with no hope of survival passes through five stages of emotional response: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

It may be a bit too brutal a diagnosis; but, in all likelihood, the clinical diagnostic part of the profession of allopathic medicine is now on deathbed, with its practitioners in state of denial and the anger stage appears to be approaching fast.

It is not just doctors, but all professionals depending on giving advice based on their specialised knowledge, such as engineers or lawyers are in the same boat that is now rocked by emergence of artificial intelligence.

A doctor’s method of deducing what is wrong with a patient is of using differential logic of looking at symptoms, linking them with known causative malaises and go on reducing the list of possibilities by adding specific details. In the end, the illness possibilities that fit the common mean are further processed by using contexts like family history, lifestyle or what is going around and a diagnosis is reached.

A doctor may like to romanticise this process by claiming use of intuition; but, on the whole it is a logical process of identifying a fitting match between database of symptoms and malaises.

Unfortunately for doctors, any process that can be described as above, is fast becoming a domain captured and dominated by artificial intelligence, fondly known as AI by its friends.

While a doctor may or may not remember all what he has studied in terms of illnesses and their expressions in human body, a differential diagnostic AI tool would have no such problem. It can retain any amount of pure data without facing memory limitations.

AI linked with universal platform where new research would be adding more knowledge becomes unbeatable competitor for an ageing doctor who is going to be unable to learn. So, in putting illnesses and symptoms together, AI is bound to surpass human ability quickly and move far ahead.

This paradigm shift in medical field is not a distant phenomenon. It is already here. AI based systems are in use and becoming increasingly common. But, it is not AI’s ability to link illnesses with symptoms that is special. AI also has another superpower that will transform medicine completely.

The greatest advantage AI has is its ability to learn. It can absorb infinite amount of data and see patterns within it that are invisible to human intelligence.

For example, if large number of MRI images of patients with cancer are made available to AI for data crunching, an AI tool can develop ability to read MRI images for cancer diagnosis with greater accuracy than a senior doctor, and it can do this almost overnight.

We are almost there in an age of machines where you can go to a mall where a universal diagnostic kiosk can be found in a shop that would diagnose what is wrong with your health and dispense advice and medicines, that too using a soothing voice and ascent of your choice.

For many of us, imagining world where machines would replace humans is extremely uncomfortable, but this is an inevitable reality just around the corner. Even if we are emotional animals with absurd fixation for nostalgia, we live in a world run by market forces. The efficiency and economy that AI is ushering in is impossible to resist now.

There is no point comparing cost of production of an AI diagnostic tool and training cost of a human doctor, as former would be extremely low. So, there is absolutely no doubt that coming few generations are probably last of the conventional doctors we are producing.

But, does it mean that medical profession is required to be handed over to the machines with no real participation of human beings?

The answer is a vehement NO. We need doctors, but not in the same format. Unburdened from the job of diagnosing illnesses, the same human intelligence can now be spared for pushing the envelope of knowledge. Doctors can shift from clinical practice to research that can now move at an accelerated speed because of machines.

Just as clinical medicine is about to see a transformation, the entire healthcare sector is about to get disrupted with developments in biotech. With genetic handle of life now getting more and more accessible, we are going to change the way we treat human body.

The age of the artificial intelligence is not a threat for human intelligence. It is an opportunity that humanity needs to capitalise on. Growth of knowledge can be and must be speeded up with enormous empowerment granted to us by AI.

The doctor, as we know her may be dead, but long live the new age doctor, as she must play a new role in the most critical domain of our existence as it is still linked with our bodies.